Why do you have a profile w/ 1600 tabs in it. If whatever it is is so important, aren't you afraid to lose it? I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.
> I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.
This is why Firefox stores a sessionstore file. _And_ a backup of that sessionstore file. And a previous version of that sessionstore file. And a backup of the file as of the last several times you did a browser update.
The idea is to never lose the session in an irrecoverable way.
There are a lot of people who use tabs as bookmarks. Seems like a good way to keep the RAM industry going strong. Someone once told me (seriously) "I need at least 128 GB of RAM otherwise I can't keep my tabs open." But does everything you were interested in over the last X weeks or months really need to be loaded up? No, and if you use it like that then it can't preload stuff. I think the main lesson is that bookmar…
Couldn't agree more. Bookmarks are so poorly implemented, people use tabs instead. Which is dumb
> It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare." No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant" Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?
Different people are different. When researching a question without a direct answer, it's more effective for me to open up tabs as I read a page and then search the most likely candidate. Whenever I reach a dead-end I can just switch tabs as opposed to pressing the back button N times. zzalpha's comment sums it up nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086 I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective…
The same approach works well for forum discussions. One tab representing the forum, and child-tabs to track the comments section.
For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.
I feel like preserving open tabs across a crash is not that hard from a technical point of view. The thing I'd be afraid of is more that something would decide (for me) that I don't want to preserve tabs.
Right. I guess as an engineer, I would be afraid to use something for data storage that is intended more as ephemeral state. But I suppose if you back it up you can always go back.
The Firefox session is not intended as ephemeral state, fwiw. Certainly the session-restore code doesn't treat it that way.
I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all. I've just updated to Firefox 55 to t…
Firefox lazy loads tabs on startup, but not otherwise. So if you open a YouTube in a new tab it will start playing. Chrome, on the other hand, will not start playing the video, which is nice. I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.
The current Nightly doesn't autoplay until I focus the tab now. I'm not sure if this is a Youtube-the-website feature or Firefox-lazy-load feature.
This, exactly. I'd love to open half a dozen tabs pointing at videos, without having to wait for each one to load and then quickly pause it. (Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)
Some sites, such as YouTube, don't start playing a video until you switch to the tab.
That hasn't been my experience with YouTube; middle-clicking to open a half-dozen videos in tabs starts all the videos playing at once.
This is being actively worked on and coming soon to Firefox.
Should be in 56: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/06/12/datetime-inputs-...
I hope it is locale-sensitive. US is the only country that uses mainly the mm/dd/yyyy. Most of the others use dd/mm/yyyy with some important exceptions (China, Japan, Korea) with yyyy/mm/dd (which happens to be the standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
Not to at all dispute your use case/requirements or anything, but as a depth-first browser user, I can't even fathom a world in which 150 tabs qualifies as "moderately" large, and not "how many tabs???" large. And 1000+ (as cited by a sibling poster)? Wow! I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...
> I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor... Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed…
It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs. Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been fro…
There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.
I'm curious, do you not have tons of tabs open? Do you just use a few at a time? A typical day at work will require at least 50+ tabs for each customer that comes in, plus Google/StackOverflow/Slack for whatever I'm researching, not to mention a few SoundCloud/YouTube tabs for music, while browsing Reddit or HackerNews, and then whatever I have racked up to read later. I'm open to another solution though, but can't think of one.
I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all. I've just updated to Firefox 55 to t…
For Chrome, the Great Suspender plugin had fixed the resource usage for me, it's kind of like lazy loading + freezing of heavy background tabs, and it enables quick startup even with 100 tabs. But it should be a core feature of the browser itself IMHO.
I used the Great Suspender for a few months and thought it was great. Unfortunately, at some point tabs I came back to were 404ed =/ It's also why I switched away from bookmarks to Evernote (and later Bear) so I could capture the page in addition to the address for reference.
I guess I should use it in tandem with that plugin that replaces 404 pages with archive.org links...